Articles

"When the dark powers seem to be winning, our impulses tell us to get angry, fight back, win the argument of the day. As human as such reactions may seem, there is a stronger, more profound response necessary: that we respect our opponent, pray for our enemy and speak truth with love. And again, this can only happen with prayer." As followers of the Gospel, our immediate response to news of suffering and destruction must be to turn to prayer. It is in prayer that we reconnect to our center: Christ living within us.

Dr. Dennis O’Hara and Fr. Steve Dunn, C.P. facilitated an Open Forum on Pope Francis’ new encyclical Laudato Si on June 30, 2015 at St Gabriel’s Parish in Toronto, Canada. Close to three hundred people attended. Many from different parishes and religious congregations all across the city gathered to celebrate the encyclical and to draw and to share insights from it. Many communities are finding that the best place to begin is with an open discussion!

Has civic discourse become impossible? Are we so fragmewnted and polarized that common ground and consensus are "relics of a distant past? Writer and teacher, Paul Wadell, walks us through a hopeful challenge in this essay.

NEWSLETTER

Inspirational Quotes

This lack of physical contact and encounter, encouraged at times by the disintegration of our cities, can lead to a numbing of conscience and to tendentious analyses which neglect parts of reality. At times this attitude exists side by side with a “green” rhetoric. Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. (49)

Pope Francis I

Ladauto Si

"How is it that sometimes subtly, sometimes with a sudden startle, God breaks through the thick fog of our collective blindness? Our lives confront us with the inevitable experience of our own suffering, the suffering we cause to others, the pain we experience in and with the suffering of others."

—Elaine M. Prevallet

"Don’t wait for some miracle to be performed on you from without, lifting you above your fears and doubts and self-centeredness. You help God from within by turning in outgoing love to others, and miraculously your fears and doubts and self-centeredness will vanish. The miracle starts within, not from without."